Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror was a highly centralized political regime (June 1793 - July 1794) in time of the French Revolution, that intended to pursue the Revolution on social matters, to destroy the suspected internal enemies and conspirators by brutal repression (The Terror) and to oust the external enemies from French territory.
The French Revolution was threatened both by internal enemies and conspirators, and by foreign European monarchies fearing that the Revolution would spread. Almost all European governments in those days were based on sovereign right and they wanted to stifle the democratic and republican ideas. Their armies were pressing on the border of France. The former nobility, having lost its inherited privileges, had a stake in having the revolution failed. The Catholic Church was also generally hostile to the Revolution, which turned the clergy into employees of the state, requiring them take an oath of loyalty to the nation. About half the clergy, mainly in western France, refused the oath, becoming known as refractory priests. Understandably, these Catholic priests and the former nobility entered in conspiracies, often invoking foreign military intervention. In the West region Vendée, an insurrection supported by England, led by priests and former nobles, was started in the spring of 1793. The extend of civil war and the advance of foreign armies on national territory produced a political crisis, increasing the rivalry between the Girondins and the more radical Jacobins having the support of Parisian population.
On June 2, Paris sections, encouraged by the enraged Jacques Roux and Jacques Hébert, siege Convention calling for administrative and political purges, low fixed bread price, voting rights for sans-culottes alone. With backing of National Guard, they managed to convince the Convention to arrest 31 Girondins leaders - including Jacques Pierre Brissot. Following these arrests, the Jacobins were able to gain control of the Committee of Public Safety on June 10, installing the revolutionar dictatorship. On July 13, the asassination of Jean-Paul Marat, a Jacobin leader and the main responsible of the September 1792 massacres, by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin woman, will have in result another increase of Jacobins political influence. The leader of August 1792 uprising against the king, George Danton, having the image of a man tended toward richness, was replaced from the Committee, and on July 27, the Incorruptible Maximilien de Robespierre made his entrance, quickly becoming the most influent member of the Committee, by the radical measures taken against the Revolution's internal and external enemies.
Meanwhile, on June 24, Convention adopted the first republican constitution of France -Constitution of the Year I. Ratified by public referendum, it has never been applied.
Facing local revolts and foreign armies invasions both in East and West of the country, the most urgent government business was the war. On August 17, Convention voted general conscription, which mobilized all citizens to serve as soldiers or suppliers in the war effort. On September 5, people of Paris put the institution of Terror as the order of the day in Convention.
La terreur n'est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible. ("Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice.") -Robespierre
The result was a policy through which the state used violent repression to crush resistance to the central government. Under Comittee total control, Convention quickly enacted more legislation. On September 9, Convention established sans-culotte paramilitary forces, the revolutionary armies, to force farmers to surrender grain demanded by the government. On September 17, the Law of Suspects was passed, which authorized the charging of counter-revolutionaries with vaguely defined crimes against liberty. On September 29, Convention extended price-fixing from grain and bread to other essential goods and fixed wages.
The Reign of Terror played out under the direction of the Committee of Public Safety, a committee of twelve, including leader Maximilien Robespierre, who later fell victim to his own campaign of terror.
The Terror is very aptly named. Revolutionary tribunals summarily condemned thousands of innocent civilians to death by the guillotine. Mobs beat some victims to death. Sometimes people died for their political opinions or actions, but often for little reason whatsoever beyond mere suspicion. Most of the victims received an unceremonious trip to the guillotine in the "tumbrel". Loaded on these carts, the victims would proceed through throngs of jeering men and women.
The Terror started on September 5, 1793 when the National Convention voted to implement terror measures to repress counter-revolutionary activities. The ensuing Reign of Terror lasted until the spring of 1794, and killed (estimates vary wildly) anywhere between 18,000 to 40,000 people. In the single month before it ended, 1300 executions took place.
The events of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) and the subsequent guillotining of Robespierre (28 July 1794) marked the end of the Reign of Terror and the start of the Thermidorian Reaction.
The Reign of Terror is the subject of Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities. It was also the setting for an early episode of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor and his companions travelled back in time to 1794 and encountered Robespierre.
The White Terror took place in 1815 following the return of King Louis XVIII to power; people suspected of having ties with the governments of the Revolution or of Napoleon sufferred arrest and execution.